Anomaly detection of isolating switch based on single shot multibox detector and improved frame differencing

High-voltage isolating switches play a paramount role in ensuring the safety of power supply systems. However, their exposure to outdoor environmental conditions may cause serious physical defects, which may result in great risk to power supply systems and society. Image processing-based methods have been used for anomaly detection. However, their accuracy is affected by numerous uncertainties due to manually extracted features, which makes the anomaly detection of isolating switches still challenging. In this paper, a vision-based anomaly detection method for isolating switches, which uses the rotational angle of the switch system for more accurate and direct anomaly detection with the help of deep learning (DL) and image processing methods (Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), improved frame differencing method, and Hough transform), is proposed. The SSD is a deep learning method for object classification and localization. In addition, an improved frame differencing method is introduced for better feature extraction and a hough transform method is adopted for rotational angle calculation. A number of experiments are conducted for anomaly detection of single and multiple switches using video frames. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the SSD outperforms the You-Only-Look-Once network. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method have been proven under various conditions, such as different illumination and camera locations using 96 videos from the experiments.